Renderings of the CURV condo project in Vancouver by partners Brivia Group and Henson Group. For housing experts, the failure of a significant residential project illustrates everything wrong with government housing policies.Brivia Group/Henson Group
Last week, news broke that the 60-storey luxury tower planned near Burrard and Nelson streets in downtown Vancouver was headed into receivership, one of many debacles in the presale condo market in the last couple of years.
For housing experts, the failure of a significant residential project illustrates everything wrong with government housing policies.
In the case of the Curv tower, units in the two apartment buildings at 1059 and 1075 Nelson St. were vacated to make way for the project, but the empty buildings remain. The occupants of the 51 units are the casualties of a housing system that favoured profits over housing needs, said Andy Yan, associate professor of professional practice in urban studies at Simon Fraser University.
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“You could see the Curv project as either a cautionary tale of speculative avarice in Vancouver’s real estate market – or you could see it as a foreshadowing of things to come in the Broadway Plan and other parts of the city,” said Mr. Yan. “Working and middle-income renters are displaced and pay the price for the city’s ambitions.”
The site had initially been purchased by Wall Financial Corp. in 2013 for $16.8-million. Three years later, Wall sold it to a group of Chinese immigrant buyers for $60 million, as reported by the South China Morning Post. A month later, the group flipped it for $68-million. Henson Development and Montreal-based Brivia Group purchased the site in 2021 for an undisclosed amount and designed an energy efficient residential tower, a mix of condos and rentals. The marketer for the presales, Jacky Chan, had told The Globe and Mail he’d sold one of the 358 luxury units for $4,400 per square foot. But sales lagged, and construction on the troubled project failed to start last year. The developers were allowed by the city to pay cash instead of building the 102 units that they had to build. The city was promised 174 units of rental; instead, it is now down by 51 units.
The site had initially been purchased by Wall Financial Corp. in 2013 for $16.8-million.Brivia Group/Henson Group
All three levels of government are increasingly catering to the development industry and as a result are failing to answer to the public, said Erick Villagomez, instructor at the University of B.C.’s School of Community and Regional Planning. For example, the city of Vancouver is devoted to zoning that favours the high-rise tower as a panacea to the housing crisis, even though it’s the slowest and riskiest building form, as the Curv demonstrates. Curv was the result of the city’s West End Community Plan from a decade ago, which incentivized speculation and redevelopment of older apartment buildings, and highly affordable housing.
Tax policies are often tantamount to a subsidy, such as Vancouver’s $3.8-million in Empty Homes Tax refunds in 2022, given to developers who’d failed to sell built condos, said Mr. Villagomez. An apartment building is exempt from the Empty Homes Tax as long as one unit remains occupied.
Developers can reduce taxes on empty lots by converting them to community gardens, he pointed out.
At the federal level, the Canada Mortgage and Housing corporation’s MLI Select program guarantees large-scale projects that offer little in the way of affordability. And now the federal government is talking about supporting the industry in a way that many are calling a bailout.
And for all the subsidies, loopholes and delays, the public pays the price, both in taxpayer money and in the time that could have been spent building suitable housing, he said.
“The public is subsidizing profit making,” said Mr. Villagomez. “One can’t rely solely on an industry that is based on profit making to solve a public good. It doesn’t work.”
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The “build more” narrative justifies a lot of the policies that are working against viable solutions, he argued. And a federal bailout will only add to the damage, especially without safeguards in place.
“I think the citizenry generally speaking are getting more and more aware that ‘supply, supply, supply’ is not going to work, especially as we see tenants being demo-victed, renovicted, et cetera, and the Curv is a case in point.
“Yet it continues, because those that do make the decisions seem to have fallen in line with that. And it seems to be more extreme … across all levels of government, municipal, provincial and federal.”
The Curv is merely one example. A far more encompassing example of policy being put to the test is the Broadway Plan, from Vine Street to the west and Clark Drive to the east, and 16th Avenue to the south and 1st Avenue to the north.
The area is an example of “over zoning,” said Tom Phipps, the former city of Vancouver senior planner in charge of major projects. Over zoning means the random distribution of density, allowing 20-storey buildings over the 500-block area of the Broadway Plan, or any other sweeping rezoning that doesn’t consider neighbourhood impact, or the services and amenities required, such as schools, community centres and swimming pools.
When that happens, it destabilizes neighbourhoods such as the ones within the Broadway Plan, said Mr. Phipps. He is one of several former senior city staff who’ve been publicly critical about the city’s current direction. He said there’s a top-down culture at city hall that is partly to blame. As well, the city’s attitude toward residents who oppose their policies is divisive, “in a way that you’re either for us or against us,” he said. Instead of public process, residents are given “a sales pitch.”
“We spend a huge amount of time and … federal, provincial and civic dollars, trying to stabilize those same areas that are now being destabilized by this kind of policy,” said Mr. Phipps.
“Many of those areas had average working people and immigrants, and they put their sweat and tears and money into making those neighbourhoods a better place, and we reinforced that by government policies. And now we are turning around and destabilizing the same neighbourhoods so it’s shooting ourselves in the foot.”
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The result is speculation and uncertainty, and eventually derelict properties and people leaving the area, he said.
“Really, the question should be, housing for whom? Who are we building for? I don’t think that’s been given much consideration.”
Mr. Villagomez said there’s another feature of government policy that is having a negative impact and that’s the idea of building obsolescence. He cites architecture professor Daniel M. Abramson’s book Obsolescence: An Architectural History, in which he explains that building obsolescence was the creation of real estate experts in the late 19th century, as a way to justify redevelopment profit-making. Buildings were deemed outdated not because of decay, said Mr. Villagomez, but because tearing them down generated profit. The idea, he said, was first introduced by the U.S. Treasury to allow tax writeoffs and then adopted by real estate lobbies. Obsolescence as a dominant belief led to urban renewal and demolition of entire neighbourhoods. In Vancouver, Chinatown was almost a target until the community fought back.
“The Broadway Plan is one such example,” said Mr. Villagomez. “They don’t say it explicitly but it’s implied, in the fact that you are changing 500 blocks. It doesn’t define – even in the plan – what the character is, or the identity of these places, if there’s anything worth keeping here. All these things are left unsaid. It was underwritten by that idea, that these areas are obsolete, and towers are the way to go.”
He’s written a post on obsolescence, taxes and loopholes for his Spacing Vancouver urbanism website.
“A lot of people have asked me, ‘there are a bunch of homes and buildings here, why don’t we reuse them? What is the logic behind tearing down a completely fine rental building and building new, what is the logic there?’ I was trying to describe what that was, and where it came from, and the fact it was invented. It had no real connection to reality. It’s about speculation about the future.”